Abstract
Spanning the Middle East and North Africa region and using real cases, this chapter traces the trajectory of euphoria, backlash, and persistence that has marked women’s participation in the Arab Spring transnational revolution. The chapter reveals how in revolutions, as in wars, norms and values are suspended “for the duration” in order to accommodate necessary breaches of what is normally considered appropriate. It also shows that when the crisis is over, the cultural police try to restore traditional gender norms in an attempt to “squeeze the genie back into the lamp.” The chapter highlights how women in the Middle East and North Africa are learning various lessons from the different revolutions, starting with the Algerian revolution, going through the Palestinian revolution, and moving on to the Arab Spring.
For inviting me to present versions of this chapter, I thank Fatima Sadiqi at the Isis Center for Women and Development (Fez, Morocco) and Roxanne Bibizadeh and the Humanities Council at the University of Warwick (England).
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Notes
- 1.
http://artforum.com/words/id = 30394 (accessed July 19, 2014).
- 2.
Thanks to Basma Hamdy for explaining the origin of the mural and for sharing an email from ‘Awad about the source and meaning of the Na’ihat (mourners) (Durham, NC, March 29, 2014).
- 3.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/26/world/meast/yemen-protests/ (accessed July 19, 2014).
- 4.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKPtUWT_fiE&list=PLXhuzKSXJ9OSeMwlQ7qrxCajozFoPeBB6&index=6 (accessed July 19, 2014). See also Dabashi 2012, 187.
- 5.
http://rt.com/news/164380-syrian-election-legitimate-vote/ ( accessed June 8, 2014).
- 6.
Monica Marks defends Tunisia’s Islamists against detractors, pointing out that 42 out of 49 women elected to the Constituent Assembly were Nahdawis. She claims that this is the case because al-Nahda was the only party “to fully respect gender parity rules (mabda’ al-tanasuf) for electoral lists (passed in May 2011).” Further, women won over undecided voters”(Gana 2013, 225). Marks attributes Tunisian women’s problems to embedded social norms and to mutual suspicion between secularist women and Islamists, who see secularists “as an elite, French-speaking minority whose concerns are self-serving, superficial, and far removed from the lived realities of most Tunisian women” (241).
- 7.
Elisabeth Flock “Women in the Arab Spring: the other side of the story,” Washington Post June 21, 2011.
- 8.
Ratib Shabu, “Women in the Syrian Revolution.” In Rustum, M. “Huquq al-nisa? fi Suriya qabla wa athna’ al-thawra: khitab wa haqiqa,” May 2014, 16. Available from: http://hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Civil-Society-in-West-Asia/node_8905/node_31181 (accessed June 9, 2014).
- 9.
Founded in 2010, HarassMap is an organization dedicated to ending “the social acceptability of sexual harassment and assault in Egypt” (available from: http://harassmap.org.en ).
- 10.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/12/us-arab-women-spring-analysis-idUSBRE9AB00O20131112 (accessed March 3, 2014).
- 11.
“In the two weeks after January 25, 2013, several women, including two who had been assaulted in November 2012—Yasmine al Baramawy and Mosireen filmmaker and OpAntiSH member Aida al-Kashef—spoke in graphic terms about their experiences, sometimes talking for more than five uninterrupted minutes” (Langohr 2013. Available from: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer268/our-square [accessed May 29, 2014]).
- 12.
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer268/our-square (accessed June 11, 2014).
- 13.
http://womenonwalls.com/in-mansoura-join-us-or-if-you-cant-follow-our-daily-journal-and-flickr/ (accessed July 19, 2014).
- 14.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = JBuTFUlu6WY (accessed July 16, 2014).
- 15.
- 16.
In October 2011, Soliman was awarded the Willy Brandt Special Award for Political Courage. Brinda Mehta calls the play “a work-in-progress that is subjected to multiple revisions, re-enactments … The ‘unfinished’ nature of the series inhibits any definitive version of the uprisings through its shifting decentered perspectives” (Mehta 2014, 221).
- 17.
Le Nevez, A. & Ikram Lakhdhar, I. “Artworks and Property vandalized during a Night of Tension in Tunis,” June 11, 2012. Available from: http://www.tunisia-live.net/2012/06/11/artworks-and-property-vandalized-during-a-night-of-tension-in-tunis/#sthash.GzadQ0X7.dpuf (accessed November 17, 2013).
- 18.
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/823378/tunisias-culture-minister-flip-flops-on-censored-artist-nadia (accessed November 17, 2013). For a cynical take on the “neo-orientalist” (not political) representations of women veiled and unveiled and the suggestion that the artists themselves were the ones to create the scandal in order to attract attention, see http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/73 (accessed February 25, 2014). A Ministry of the Interior spokesman “insinuated that the whole incident had been staged by the artists themselves” (available from: http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/54 [accessed March 1, 2014]).
- 19.
http://www.dw.de/syrian-art-flourishes-in-exile/a-17681159. Brisly’s art can be found at http://diala-brisly.blogspot.com.tr/ (accessed June 8, 2014).
- 20.
http://gulflabor.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/%E2%80%A6-And-Justice-for-All.pdf (accessed January 3, 2014).
- 21.
With thanks to Cathia Jenainati for this felicitous turn of phrase.
- 22.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-02/millennials-are-rise-middle-east-and-bring-their-own-agenda (accessed July 3, 2014).
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cooke, m. (2016). Women and the Arab Spring: A Transnational, Feminist Revolution. In: Sadiqi, F. (eds) Women’s Movements in Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50675-7_3
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